I wonder about a boy who has just turned 14 today.
Who falls in love with a boy in the year above.
Who might follow someone home one summer’s afternoon.
I think he could experience things exactly as I experienced then twenty eight years ago.
He might see a gay paper on a news-stand and have all the fears that I had buying it.
He would be embarrassed at the small ads.
He wouldn’t be able to show his parent or take it to school.
But I think he would know that there were many like him.
That there were men he could admire.
Men he could identify with.
He would know there was a world he could enter without shame.
That he would have to play safely in.
He might have to bide his time through school.
He might have to leave the place he was born in and move to the city.
But city connects with city.
Country with country.
Customs officials can be bi-passed by bouncing messages across the world by satellite.
The walls are breaking down and the world is becoming one.
Time is on his side.

The world has a great responsibility to make him welcome.
Help him through it.
Give him confidence.
Don’t break him down with dismissive looks.
Don’t leave him alone in a corner unless he wants to be alone.
Buy him a drink.
Show him around.
Love him and cherish him.
Don’t wait until he’s dying to show him compassion.
Light up his history, his culture.
And fight for him.
And by him I mean that impulse to feel something for your own sex that, hated, buried and twisted, turns itself into the thrusting of bayonets, the crushing of bodies under tanks... the world over.
Let him go out into the world confident of who he is, sure of himself, with the best shot at happiness.

-- Ron Peck 1991